When Amazon got its start, we had brilliant engineers…
They wrote the Obidos webserver. Obidos made Amazon
successful… Obidos was a key cornerstone of Amazon's
initial success…

They all used Emacs, of course. Hell, Eric Benson was one of
the authors of XEmacs. All of the greatest engineers in the
world use Emacs. The world-changer types… I'm talking
about the greatest software developers of our profession, the
ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings,
the Larry Walls, the Paul Grahams, the Jamie Zawinskis, the
Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way
smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if
you can master it. Go look over Paul Nordstrom's shoulder
while he works sometime, if you don't believe me. It's a real
eye-opener for someone who's used Visual Blub .NET-like IDEs
their whole career.

Emacs is the 100-year editor…

Shel wrote Mailman in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp… Mailman was the
Customer Service customer-email processing application for
… four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written
in Emacs. Everyone loved it.

People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen
to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much
they miss Mailman. I'm not shitting you. Last Christmas I was
at an Amazon party, some party I have no idea how I got
invited to, filled with business people, all of them much
prettier and more charming than me and the folks I work with
here in the Furnace, the Boiler Room of Amazon. Four young
women found out I was in Customer Service, cornered me, and
talked for fifteen minutes about how much they missed Mailman
and Emacs, and how Arizona (the JSP replacement we'd spent
years developing) still just wasn't doing it for them.

It was truly surreal. I think they may have spiked the eggnog.

Shel's a genius. Emacs is a genius. Even non-technical people
love Emacs. I'm typing in Emacs right now. I'd never
voluntarily type anywhere else. It's more than just a
productivity boost from having great typing shortcuts and
text-editing features found nowhere else on the planet. I type
130 to 140 WPM, error-free, in Emacs, when I'm doing free-form
text. I've timed it, with a typing-test Emacs application I
wrote. But it's more than that.

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